The Boston Aquarium has an extremely important message for you.

Good god, I hate it when my cephalopod slithers away into the dark night. And then ends up at a tastefully appointed pop-up tapas bar somewhere in the dark heart of Chelsea. Just hate it.

 

“Oh no, honey—that sound you hear late at night? That is merely the wailing of the unpaid interns. You needn’t worry about being among them—we’ll ensure you major in something practical,” he told his child. “In New England.”

He closed the shutters of the child’s bedroom in their handsome Manhattan apartment. It would not be good to tell him the truth. Not now.

“They are lost souls, honey. Lost souls who believed the humanities would ensure them professorships and fulfilling careers someday,and other silly fantasies like that. You mustn’t let them unsettle you,” he said. He flicked off the light. “Now, good night.”

The child stared into the darkness, fixing his eyes on the glue-on glow in the dark stars on his ceiling. “I wonder if Daddy is telling the truth,” he thought.

If you go to an aquarium with your friends, be prepared to argue for approximately 20 minutes about whether Pacu are actually piranha’s, and what exceptionally exciting things might happen if you decided to go for a dip with them with an open, bleeding wound. (That guy on the show about FISH THAT WANT YOU DEAD can provide a pretty compelling answer).

 

The Mormon Temple of Nauvoo, Illinois. Insert canned Mitt Romney joke here. It’s rather magnificent and was constructed in the 1990s to replace the original, which was taken down when the Mormons decamped to Utah after the death of Joseph Smith in the mid-1800s. My gentile ex-boyfriend was allowed to tour it right after it was built in 1999, before they consecrated it. He said it was more than a little creepy.

It’s also the source of a lot of tourism in the immediate area from Mormons, which explains the remarkable preponderance of local buffets and ice cream parlors. (How else do you unwind when you aren’t allowed to drink bourbon? The mind boggles).

A little scatological humor on behalf of the capitol of world power? Yeah, I can totally do that. (I spent an embarrassingly long period of time adjusting my cameras settings for this photo, while Asian tourists wondered why I was STANDING RIGHT THERE and being very serious).

Thy eyes do not deceive you. That is a Hipster Ice Cream TukTuk (or autorickshaw, if you prefer). Christ, I wish I’d thought of this.

I do intend to someday purchase a Khmer-style tuk tuk, paint it Mardi Gras colors, and haul both my friends and exotic booze around in New Orleans. It’s good to have goals in life.